1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a bandwidth control service management apparatus, and in particular to an apparatus for managing a bandwidth control service offered within a network operated by a network offerer such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP), and a customer.
2. Description of the Related Art
With a spread of personal computers and cellular phones, those who use the Internet have been rapidly increasing. Also, with sequential appearances of new services over the Internet such as an on-line banking and an Internet telephone, huge application programs which exceed several tens of megabytes and multi-media contents such as music and video have been treated, so that the amount of exchanged information has been also increasing year by year.
In such a background, a communication environment with high quality, speed and reliability has been intensively demanded by not only customers who use the Internet on business but also individual customers.
In response to such customer's needs, a network offerer offers a high quality communication service called IP-VPN. This service guarantees a minimum bandwidth for a contracted customer. When using this service, the customer is required to preliminarily designate a desired guarantee bandwidth at the time of contracting, and to pay a predetermined service rate (fee) to the network offerer according to the bandwidth per month.
It is to be noted that for the high quality communication service offered to the customer, there is a method in which a priority control of the communication from the customer is performed according to a grade (class) the customer has contracted, in addition to the method in which the bandwidth the customer has designated is guaranteed.
The service which enables the network offerer to offer the high quality communication environment to the customer by one of those methods will now be called a bandwidth control service.
(1) Since requiring a preliminary contract per month, the present bandwidth control service is comparatively expensive and hard to use for the customer whose frequency in use is low. Also, the contract is made on the assumption of use for a predetermined period (e.g. half a year), so that such a service is hard to spread over the individual customer.
Furthermore, no provider adopts, at the present, the bandwidth control service which can be dynamically and promptly used under the customer's initiation. Even if the situation where the customer urgently desires to down load some data in a short time occurs, it is impossible to use the bandwidth control service only for the situation.
As a technique to solve such a problem, a method is devised in the “Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No.5-316205” in which a customer (node) himself (itself) sets a communication cost and a communication quality based on the importance of communication and traffic status so that the transmission rate, route, and communication cost are dynamically controlled.
However, it is only the node where the customer is accommodated that the customer can set the communication quality and control the service. The customer can not control other nodes relating to the communication such as a node to which another customer, with whom the former customer is communicating, connects.
Accordingly, in order to dynamically and promptly apply the bandwidth control service in the network of the network offerer, it is required that the network offerer introduces the node which supports the method to the whole network, and that the customer or the network offerer performs the same setting to all of the relating nodes.
Also, this method has no constitution in which a plurality of bandwidth control services executed over the network of the network offerer are managed. Therefore, when a plurality of customers set a high communication quality at the same time in the network, there is a possibility that the network is congested, resulting in a decreased communication quality.
(2) In order to obey the quality contracted with the customer when the network offerer performs the dynamic bandwidth control service, it is required to secure a certain extent of a network resource according to the number of the customers. However, reinforcing the network resource on the assumption that many customers use the service at one time requires an introduction cost, and incurrs a high possibility that much resource is generally kept unoccupied, or wasted.
As a method of making the most of the limited network resource efficiently, the method is devised in the “Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No.11-122394” in which an appreciate accounting unit price is set according to a traffic status, and in which a communication demand amount corresponding to the network resource is always awakened.
However, this method would require a controller and a price display device on the customer's side, so that a new equipment investment for the customer is required.
Also, this method has a constitution in which the accounting rate rises higher as the network is congested, and the limit of the number of the customers or the like is not made clear especially. Accordingly, if the bandwidth control service is offered to many customers, there is a possibility that the service rate becomes extremely expensive, or that the network is congested and the communication quality contracted with the customer can not be obeyed.